Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!labrea!glacier!jbn
From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: type checking
Message-ID: <17702@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 13 Sep 88 15:32:51 GMT
References: <8808121826.AA23206@jade.berkeley.edu> <1575@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <7071@well.UUCP> <1457@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 21


      "while maintaining the thing everybody likes - the environment."
The block-oriented disk files and the heap-structured dictionary?
That's a desirable environment?

      I've used Forth out of dire necessity on very tiny machines in
embedded applications.  But I cannot see much use for it on anything
large enough to support a serious compiler.  On the other hand, a
compiled Forth with type checking might be useful.  

      One observation is that novice programmers get excited about small
scale syntactical issues, such as RPN vs infix, and more experienced
programmers get excited about large scale issues, such as modularity and
name-space management.  As program size grows, these issues dominate,
for combinatorial reasons.

      In some ways, Forth is reminiscent of APL, another language for small
programs.  APL is a language of clever one-liners, like Forth.  APL is also
almost unmaintainable.  As well as being almost forgotten.

					John Nagle